Riot announced that Valorant will follow in the footsteps of League of Legends by forcing players to change their in-game ID if it breaks the Code of conduct.
Valorant has been the tactical shooter hit of the summer drawing not only casual players but also many pros from other games. The competitive scene for Riot’s shooter is already looking stable and the company plans to keep it that way. When it comes to the technical and social aspect, there's still quite a lot of work to be done. It’s no secret that Riot Games unified Riot accounts for all their games and now they’re taking another step further.
Forced Name Change Coming to Valorant
According to the latest tweet by the official VALORANT Twitter account, players with an offensive name might be forced to change it on their next log in.
As @RiotSuperCakes has said, keeping a sportsmanlike environment where players respect one another is one of our top priorities. Today we're launching Forced Name Change for in-game Riot IDs.
— VALORANT (@PlayVALORANT) September 22, 2020
This raises a lot of questions and some of them were answered in the follow-up tweets. There Riot mentioned that anyone who has a name that violates the Code of Conduct (hate speech, slurs, etc.) will go through an automated check. We’re really curious what Riot will classify as hate speech since that term gained popularity over the last few years. To be fair, anything can be considered hate speech nowadays, so we’re hoping Riot keeps that list rather short.
So, how do you get forced to change your name?
First and foremost, you have to get reported. If nobody reports you, you'll never go through an automated check. The latter is not a guarantee that you’ll have to change your name since if you’re not a wrongdoer according to the list you should be fine. Technically your in-game name could be indecent but not really insulting or considered hate speech.
This system has been active in League of Legends for years now and the difference is rather clear. One thing’s for sure and it’s that it works since LoL has almost no issues when it comes to names (we wish we could say the same for in-game toxicity). Riot will probably continue to implement these rules not only in LoL and Valorant bus also in future titles.
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